Emily Taylor

ok so the 10m thing is what got me to finally post here because i just got my general like 6 weeks ago and ive been too nervous to actually try HF but if conditions are that good maybe now is the time? i have a technician friend who keeps telling me dont bother with HF until i have a real antenna setup but i only have room for a wire dipole in the attic, would that even be worth trying on 10 meters or am i just wasting my time

so ive been wanting to do this for like two years and last weekend i finally just did it. built a pixie kit, yeah i know its super basic but i figured start somewhere right. took maybe 3 hours to solder up and honestly most of that was me second guessing myself and looking at the schematic way too many times.
anyway threw it in a bag with my little notebook and a wire antenna i cut for 40m, drove out to the state park about 20 minutes away and just set up on a picnic table. running maybe 500mw into a random wire i had draped over a tree branch. wasnt expecting much honestly.
made contact with a guy in ohio, im in virginia, so thats like 400 miles on half a watt. i just sat there kind of dumbfounded for a minute. the whole setup cost me under 25 bucks and fit in a small backpack. i get it now, i totally get why people are obsessed with QRP. theres something completely different about it compared to just cranking up the power and making contacts. the efficiency thing really clicked for me out there.
anyone else remember their first QRP contact? also curious what people think about stepping up from a pixie — whats a reasonable next build that isnt gonna be a nightmare for someone whos decent at soldering but not an expert by any means

congrats on the ticket first of all. honestly you are overthinking it a little but thats completely normal when youre just starting out. the ft-60 is a solid choice and yeah its older but thats kind of the point — yaesu has been making that radio for a long time because it just works. the receiver is noticeably better than the baofengs in my experience, especially if you have any strong signals near your local repeater frequencies that might cause desensitization issues.
that said if youre on a tight budget theres nothing wrong with starting on a baofeng uv-5r just to get on the air and learn how things work. ive seen plenty of elmers recommend that route, just get chirp and program it properly. the 1.25m thing on the btech is neat but unless you know theres traffic on 220 in your area its probably not going to see much use, id check repeaterbook first before that factors into your decision at all.
if i were doing it over i probably would have spent the extra money upfront for something like the ft-60 or even the wouxun kg-uv9d but thats easy to say in hindsight. either way just get something and get on the air, thats the actual goal here

omg yes i had no idea 10m could even do that, im pretty new and my elmer told me 10 was basically dead for years so i never really paid attention to it. i threw my antenna up there yesterday after reading your post and managed to get like three contacts in an hour which for me is actually a lot lol. this hobby keeps surprising me

So ive been messing with RemoteHams for a few months now trying to get a proper remote setup going at my QTH in the mountains, the idea being i can run the station from work or when im traveling. Got a decent SDR front end tied into the system and for the most part it works but the audio just drops out randomly, sometimes every few minutes sometimes ill go 20 minutes without a hiccup then it falls apart completely.
The internet connection at the remote site is DSL, not great, somewhere around 6 down and maybe 0.8 up on a good day. I know thats not ideal but it was working better before I added the SDR piece into the chain. Before that I was just doing straight rig control through RemoteHams and the audio was stable enough for casual use. Now with the SDR side of things I feel like the upstream bandwidth is just getting killed.
Anyone dealt with this? Im running the RCForb client on the local end and honestly not sure if the problem is on the server side config or something with how my router at the remote site is handling QoS. Theres also some echolink stuff running on the same machine which maybe is competing for bandwidth but I wasnt changing anything there when the drops started happening.
Would love to know what codec settings people are using for low bandwidth links — I feel like there must be a sweet spot I'm missing.

yeah just go for it, i ran my first CQ WW with a wire antenna and an old Kenwood and still had a blast. one thing nobody told me before my first contest was to set up your logging software BEFORE the contest starts lol. i spent like 45 minutes messing with N1MM right when it kicked off and missed a bunch of easy contacts. also make sure your exchange is smooth, for CQ WW phone you just send your signal report and your zone so practice saying it fast because it gets repetitive quick. good luck

so ive been doing terrestrial VHF/UHF for a few years now and finally decided to take the plunge on satellite ops. picked up a used FT-817 and cobbled together a pair of yagis for 2m and 70cm, nothing fancy, hand-rotated for now. been using Gpredict for tracking and honestly that part has been easier than i expected.
my question is about the linear transponders on something like AO-73 or FO-29. i get the basic concept — inverting transponder, USB on uplink becomes LSB on downlink or whatever — but im struggling with the doppler compensation. like do i need to be correcting for both uplinks AND downlinks simultaneously or is just tracking the downlink close enough? ive read conflicting stuff about this. some guys say just chase the downlink beacon and let the uplink drift a little, others say you need to correct both or youll walk all over other stations on the passband.
also is there a way to practice this without actually keying up and potentially causing problems? feel bad just throwing RF at a transponder when i still dont fully know what im doing

oh man i remember feeling exactly like this before my first net check-in. honestly just take a breath because net control has heard it all and most of them are super patient especially with new folks.
when they open check-ins just wait for a pause and give your callsign phonetically, something like "Whiskey 4 Alpha Bravo Charlie" and thats really it for most informal nets. some nets want your name and location too but you'll hear other people doing it first so just kind of mirror what they're doing. if you key up at the same time as someone else and you hear a weird squeal or garbled audio, just wait a second and try again, no biggie at all. net control will usually say something like "stations with traffic please call again" and you just go again.
and yeah "no traffic" or just "no traffic, thanks for the net" is totally fine when they ask. you dont need to have anything prepared. the whole point for most of us is just to get on the air and be counted, its not like you have to have a reason to exist on the frequency lol. just do it, you'll kick yourself if you wait another month

40m was treating people pretty well last weekend from what i heard. did you log it on the app yet or still doing it manually? im still figuring out the adif stuff for uploading